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12 March 2017

Chained to the rhythm

The sun is starting to come up earlier behind the house on
Victoria Road. I’ve been sleeping better, without waking up to wander around in
the middle of the night like I had been in January. This morning though at five
fifteen, I woke up naturally, shut off the alarm and looked out into the
darkness from our back window, thinking about spring, and the frame of the
neighbours old green house that fell down in the storm a couple of weeks ago.
There is now no fence between us either — the storm took that as well. I would
have been concerned about that when I was thinking of buying this house earlier
last month.

On Friday morning, after I dropped Theron off at New Street,
I stopped at the Esso station by the university, needing to buy something,
although I wasn’t quite sure what. I’d fallen into the trap of eating bread and
sugar, and I went in feeling guilty. It was just after five in the morning, and
the whole place was full of drunk students. I bought a hobnobs breakfast bar,
and a chilled coffee and went to the front, where they have pulled out the
self-service machine and forced everyone to interact with the woman behind the till.
A drunk student and his girlfriend were buying something and speaking loudly to
the cashier: How can you work all night long, I’m so impressed. They were both
white, and the cashier was not — she smiled wearily at them. The back of the leg of the kid's jean had a rip — he went on and on about how amazing it was that this
cashier could work all night long.

With some petty Foucauldian archaeology, you can
trace back to moments of diversion if you try. For me, the moment of diversion, when that thing became this thing happened in 2008, in March, nine years ago now. I was in
Vientiane, in Laos. I had bought a sickle and hammer t-shirt in a market as a
joke, after riding over the border from Thailand in a tuk-tuk with some well
meaning university-aged backpackers. I was sitting in the back of a van, and someone was driving us
to the Lao-American College. We were talking, a bunch of men from the West
who were teaching English in Japan and were married to Japanese women. I was
talking about the future, about what I was doing and where I might go, moving
on to the UK to do my PhD or staying in Japan, teaching and studying by distance.
That was the plan that I upended, those three or four weeks in
August of 2008 where we packed everything up and just left Shibata and that
little job I had at that little university. When Yoko made more money than me
and I didn’t worry about much of anything but the future.

I drove home from the Esso station and thought I would do
some work, but fell asleep back in our bed, with Yoko and the girls sleeping in
the front room. The alarm went off at some point and I kept sleeping, while
Yoko and the girls got up and got ready.